I find the difference in impressions of where the cruel parts are interesting, because I personally experienced the runbacks and the ice mountain as light and pleasant palate cleansers between the frustrating battle rooms. Like I agree the Bilewater boss itself is very obnoxious and I still haven’t beaten it, but the runback didn’t seem that bad. (I was eventually able to find a trick to avoid getting poisoned in the first place on the short runback.)
The devs are clearly platform-hell fans, and they seem to basically have tried to mix in a “lite” variation of that genre into their primarily combat-oriented Metroidvania. By “lite hell” I mean that the required movement patterns are more complicated and tight than say Mario, but also simpler and more generous with the timing windows than say Celeste B-sides.
For someone who’s played two or three “intermediate-difficulty” hell platformers before, what’s in this game doesn’t appear overly intimidating. In fact because of the extra variety, I prefer it to the original HK, where the platform-hell sections were largely gated behind the late-game “true end” path.
But I can also understand why this feels mean to people who have only played conventional platformers in the past. Despite the hostile-sounding genre name, hell platformers are actually much frendlier than Silksong in terms of providing very fast retries on death and incremental training towards gradually more complex challenges.
I mean I basically full cleared Celeste and Super Meat Boy among others, what’s here isn’t harder per se but it puts it into a frame that punishes failure much more harshly. FWIW I didn’t mind the platforming in the ice mountain, I minded the harsh time pressure where if you stumbled you died and had to go back several rooms to restart. Celeste could have been identical but if it did that it’d have probably bombed.
I think I just have low tolerance for games that gleefully waste my time. I don’t care if it is via padding your lawnmower sim, making text boxes unskippable or making me run in and out of a room to kill passive floating things repeatedly to clear myself of poison every single time I have to take on a multi-stage boss encounter.
the big empty spaces in HK bother me. i guess it’s meant to be a semi-abandoned world but it never strikes me as aiming to be pinchingly desolate, with the generally chatty demeanor of NPCs and the variety of services up and running.
i feel the clash most with the colosseum: based on the roaring crowd and the amount of money you make there it seems to be the largest business attraction in Hallownest, yet it’s surrounded by the most vacant, grey hallways in the game. and the short route there from the city is to awkwardly wall climb up a gigantic dark elevator shaft. why doesn’t the elevator stop there? did everybody else come that way? it’s bizarre and feels unintendedly cold.
yes!!! they are trying sooooo hard at the most basic aspects of world design and then not at all at others and it makes me nuts. I normally don’t mind people trying too hard but the result here just sucks imo
I mean like I implied, this is not the case, it’s possible to avoid touching any poison on the shortest runback route with some nonobvious and precise combination of your air-movement abilities.
I wonder then if part of what’s going on is that Bilewater previously established expectations as such a mean and unfair area (particularly with the fake bench that dunks you into poison when you sit on it) that it would seem totally in character for it to deliberately waste minutes of your time clearing poison on every runback. So that room with the vertical shaft above a wide pool of poison can register as “room forcing a cruel, mandatory poison-dunk” instead of “room demanding some tricky air-movement punished by poison if you fail”.
There’s definitely something off with the vibe in this game where it doesn’t mind if it comes across as bullying the player. Like the swamps in From Software come off as a big fun joke in a way that Bilewater fails to. And in From Software bosses, the general loneliness of the game is balanced out by the fact that you can always summon friends to help.
And so when Silksong decides not to go too far on the meanness after all, it can become hard to see the intent. In the first HK, when all my money got stolen, I wrongly assumed I would never get it back. And in High Halls in this one, I naturally assumed the game me expected to suck it up and master the excessively long gauntlet, and was just about ready to give up the game there myself — I would never have thought I could get NPCs to help me if Tuxedo hadn’t mentioned it.
From games are both more rewarding and less punishing on average than both HK and Silksong for me. Team Cherry are clearly not humorless, but somehow their games can feel that way; in a way From’s soulslikes pretty much never do
i’ve basically paused silksong and have been focusing on HK. have effectively completely eclipsed my progress from my old playthrough of HK many years ago. despite my gripes, the game is very compelling - part of it is spite, but i do really appreciate the scope of the world. so many branching paths and little secrets. it can be such a pleasant conversation with design when it wants to be. i still get mad when i die but it only fuels the spite in me more
So I felt like it was time to go track down that third melody as I had seemingly taken care of the big obvious other things (aside for the mist area, I keep expecting someplace or someone to drop a clue how to deal with the Lost Woods-ness of it and yet I have not come across any that I noticed) and it turns out I have no idea how to get to it. I had a pair of ideas as to how to get up there, one of which that I thought was pretty good, but neither got me any closer to it.
The good news is that while searching for others ways to do so I ended up getting to do more flea stuff which was nice, I might make a push towards perhaps wrapping all their stuff up tomorrow (possibly) as I have a soft spot for those lil fellas. After that I think I’ll probably go poke around High Halls trying to find a way to said melody but if that turns out to be a dead end I honestly don’t have a next move in mind.
Beat this today (fun fact: started the game right after I got done with the skate. early access build, beat it the day skate. season 1 came out, let’s hear it for symmetry~) and I did not get any sort of tease for additional post game content or acts so I guess I’m actually done with it.
I’m not sure what I didn’t do, no clue how involved a process advancing further is, but the amount of random stuff I picked up that I never found a use for is impressive. I literally picked up something that yells constantly whenever the menu screen is open and could never determine what is to actually be done with it, so basically have been stuck with constant yelling in the background whenever I went to the menu for many hours now.
Ended up get prodded towards unlocking and doing the postgame stuff and I have to apologize to Bilewater and High Halls, it turns out the Coral Tower is the game’s actual nadir (I hope). What an unpleasant slog that was.
I have been loving the game, despite its many difficulty spikes, but now I am at a point in Act 2 where everything I have left to do is either a platforming hell or a very hard gauntlet/boss. I haven’t been playing for almost 2 weeks and I might actually drop off it.
i got to the point in HK where i’ve gotten all the moveset upgrades (except for whatever the shit is that lets you wade in the spicy liquid) and have explored the outline of the entire map and it seems like most of the game at this point is backtracking + obnoxious bosses. i will see what’s up with the black egg temple now that i’ve taken down the 3 dreamers and see how much is left to just finish the base game, otherwise i might be back on my bloodborne bullshit.
i did read about the pantheons. i guess that’s what they actually want you to eventually do: spend like an hour fighting like 30 bosses in a row. cool, cool. i’m trying to imagine the version of myself that would appreciate that.
I got the first ending in HK then went to the white buzz saw palace or whatever and uninstalled. That shit isn’t even that hard compared to a lotta masocore stuff, it just fucking lame and incongruous and I think it’s a bad sign if your game is putting auto checkpoints after every minor obstacle. Could only imagine how bad the boss fights would be.
Gave Silksong a shot after and think it’s a much better game from the jump even if a lot of the additions raise some eyebrows — pretty sure if you’re actually cool you wouldn’t add a quest journal of your own free will. Or collection quests at all. But it happened!! I guess they’re something to do. And that’s my verdict of the game so far: it’s something to do.
The pantheon boss parade was not the intended ending. It is an optional DLC area for the true sickos and really you aren’t missing a lot bY skipping out on it. You’re still playing the game as released plus two major updates.
Also helps that Silksong looks so, so much better than the original. Like some Franco Belgian deal Humanoids would publish in English rather than a webcomic that publishes one page a month. It may not be exactly to my taste but you can see how much they cared about this shit and that counts for an awful lot.
I seem to have petered out 2/3rds of the way through Act 2 as well.
The last thing I did was a few practice/routing attempts for the mini-speedrun to complete the weapon upgrade quest, which in the abstract I thought would be exactly the kind of activity I love, but in practice I wasn’t feeling it at all. Also the alternative is to fight a boss, and I feel I “have to” upgrade my weapon before doing any more bosses. I chose option #3.
My time with this game wasn’t unhappy, but all things considered, I would have a much better time beating 5-10 short-and-sweet Metroidvanias than completing this one maximalist yet austere Metroidvania. I basically felt that way from the beginning, but I gave it an extended chance to marinate in case some kind of deeper appreciation emerged over time. I haven’t really discovered that: it remains the videogame it appeared to be.
I dreaded having to do this so let me give you the advice I got: just start at the eventual destination and work your way back to the start point killing every enemy in your way and not resting at any benches. Most of them don’t respawn which makes it markedly less annoying.